WAYNE O'LEARY

Jesse Helms, Populist

Here's a political puzzler: What recently enacted economic
legislation presently under review in Washington has inspired an
improbable support coalition that includes congressional
conservatives, congressional liberals, President George W. Bush, and
the editors of the Washington Post? Answer: the
Africa-Caribbean free-trade law governing textiles, which passed last
year and is now in the process of being interpreted and implemented
by customs officials of the US Treasury Department, even as opponents
in Congress, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) most prominent among them,
look for ways to undermine it.

The law, initially introduced piecemeal as the African Growth and
Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the Caribbean Basin Initiative Trade
Enhancement Act (CBI), establishes a partial free-trade regime
between this country and the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, Central
America, and the Caribbean. Its salient feature provides for
duty-free, quota-free access to the US market of wearing apparel
assembled overseas using American fabrics and yarns. Clothing
manufactured from native materials will also enter the US duty-free,
but in more limited amounts that increase slowly over time.

Like most free-trade legislation, the officially titled Trade and
Development Act of 2000 carries a bipartisan veneer. The Senate vote
to pass was 77 to 19, with 49 of 55 Republicans (89%) and 32 of 45
Democrats (71%) in the affirmative. Barely a fifth of the senators,
in other words, resisted the siren call of corporate globalization.
The favorable House vote (309 to 110) was similarly lopsided, and
free-trader Bill Clinton, of course, signed the legislation. His
successor George W. endorses it as well.

Also on board are the corporate mass media, which myopically
insist on portraying the AGOA/CBI as humanitarian legislation, an
initiative to help poor Third World nations by exposing them fully to
the glorious benefits and opportunities of the global marketplace.
Here's the Washington Post in a July 2001 editorial opposing
congressional efforts to weaken the new law: "A rich country such as
the United States should be ashamed of maintaining protectionist
barriers against imports from countries where people are desperate
for jobs and an escape from poverty." That sounds a lot like George
W. Bush, who observed (in response to the demonstrators at last
July's G-8 economic conference in Genoa, Italy), "those who protest
free trade are no friends of the poor." They are instead, opined the
president-select, "isolationist" and "protectionist."

The poor for whom hearts bleed at the White House and the
editorial offices of the Post do not apparently include
America's working poor -- the people portrayed in Barbara
Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
and William Adler's Mollie's Job: A Story of Life and Work on
the Global Assembly Line. It is just these sorts of marginalized
Americans whose meagre employment will be shipped overseas by the
Africa-Caribbean trade law and similar initiatives coming down the
legislative pike, such as the comprehensive Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA), the super NAFTA desired by the Bush administration.
As a step in that direction, the AGOA/CBI allows for the creation of
what will be, in effect, the first non-Mexican maquiladoras.

American-based clothing manufacturers will replace domestic
processing plants with African and Latin American sweatshops using
inexpensive, nonunion labor. American raw materials will be sent
abroad to be refashioned into apparel products that will then return
dutyfree to the US market in the form of cheap African or Caribbean
"imports." This is foreign trade in name only, multiple intra-firm
transactions in which the corporation serves as its own trading
partner, generating its own internal commerce and using its Third
World site as an economic flag of convenience. The winners in the
deal are the corporate CEOs and stockholders; the losers are the
workers, here and abroad, who (in the former case) lose their jobs or
(in the latter case) gain exploitive employment that pays a
pittance.

An example of the type of company likely to benefit under such a
system is Fruit of the Loom Inc., leading American maker of underwear
and manufacturer of several well-known lines of casual apparel, whose
annual sales, produced mostly in the US, hover around $2 billion.
Anticipating imminent passage of the AGOA/CBI, the Chicago-based
multinational laid off 16,000 American employees and closed a dozen
stateside plants in the late 1990s, quietly moving 95% of its
labor-intensive sewing operations to Latin America. Fruit of the Loom
presently maintains manufacturing facilities in Honduras, El
Salvador, and Jamaica that fall conveniently under the purview of the
Africa-Caribbean law, which will function primarily to displace US
textile workers and transfer the remainder of their industry
offshore.

Of course, that's not how government proponents of this form of
trade policy view their handiwork. Proselytizers for the concept of
open-ended commerce with underdeveloped nations describe it in
mystical, almost religious terms. Backers of the AGOA/CBI in the
Office of US Trade Representative and in the State Department's
Africa section, as well as President Bush himself (in a May speech
before a trade forum in Washington), have claimed the following
potential benefits from the law: a reduction in illegal immigration,
drug trafficking, and terrorist threats to the US; a decrease in
crime, illiteracy, disease, child malnutrition, and unemployment in
impoverished Third World countries; an enhancement of democracy,
political stability, and environmental standards in emerging states;
and (in the specific case of the CBI) help for Central America in
rebuilding from hurricanes.

This would seem to be a truly wonderful piece of legislation, one
that can even compensate for bad weather! Dig a little deeper,
however, and the less edifying aspects of AGOA/CBI become clear. As
critics at the Africa Fund, a human rights organization, point out,
it contributes to the worrisome trend toward "replacing aid with
trade," thereby feeding into the flawed notion that government
foreign aid can be dispensed with and replaced by corporate
beneficence. Furthermore, they point out, the new law imposes
stringent fiscal requirements on participating countries, among them
adherence to IMF "structural adjustment programs" (freemarket fiscal
and regulatory reforms) that often lead to cutbacks in public
safety-net programs for the poor and dislocations in local
subsistence economies. Meanwhile, it does nothing in the area of debt
relief, the chronic economic problem afflicting the Third World.

This brings us belatedly to Sen. Jesse Helms, the right-wing icon
who has emerged as an unlikely Sir Lancelot on the trade issue. In an
effort to preserve North Carolina textile jobs, the senator spent the
summer crusading to have the Bush administration impose what the
Washington Post derisively calls a "protectionist
interpretation" on the AGOA/CBI, diluting its effects by blocking
Caribbean countries (or, rather, Caribbean-based US subsidiaries)
from dyeing and printing American-made cloth slated for eventual
reimportation to the US as sewn clothing. By using the hardball
tactic of holding up Senate confirmation of Bush Treasury nominees,
Helms extracted the administration's promise not to promulgate final
trade rules pending further legislative negotiations. I never thought
I'd ever say it, but I'm with you on this one, Jesse.